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The London-based company, whose AI is currently being used to tackle the world (human) champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go, said it would work with Imperial College and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust on the project.

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Elon Musk is wrong. The AI singularity won't kill us all

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DeepMind Health will start with around 15 employees, as well as two doctors to help direct its research. It will grow "rapidly", co-founder Mustafa Suleyman told Bloomberg. "We founded DeepMind to solve intelligence and use it to make the world a better place," DeepMind wrote in a statement on its website. "By developing technologies that help address some of society's toughest challenges. It was clear to us that we should focus on healthcare because it’s an area where we believe we can make a real difference to people’s lives across the world."

DeepMind explicitly said its intention was to work with and within the NHS which it added "is hugely important to our team". "We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care," a statement from the company read.

So proud to announce the launch of DeepMind Health – working with nurses & doctors to transform patient care. https://t.co/RkNjor22Zm

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One of the first projects announced so far is a new app, Streams, which will help detect cases of acute kidney injury -- a factor in as many as 20 percent of emergency hospital admissions. NHS England estimates one in four cases are preventable, which means up to 10,000 lives could be saved every year if detection rates improve. The app, developed with the Royal Free, will help doctors and nurses analyse data from patients, and identify when dangerous trends are spotted.We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care.DeepMind

DeepMind also announced the acquisition of Hark, a task management app developed by Professor Ara Darzi andDr Dominic King at Imperial. DeepMind claimed the app would help NHS staff "move beyond the pain of organising everything they do with pagers, hand-written notes and fax machines". It said a successful early trial at St Mary's Hospital in London improved clinician response times by 37 percent.

DeepMind said its future projects would remain focused on prevention, and will take cues from NHS staff rather than the whims or suppositions of tech entrepreneurs. It also maintains that it will protect patient data, while remaining as open as possible. "We will develop open and interoperable technology while absolutely protecting the confidentiality of patient data," DeepMind said. "This ensures that the benefits of innovation are widely shared."

DeepMind also said that it had formed a review board to meet four times per year to discuss its work with the NHS. The board includes Eileen Burbidge, chair of Tech City UK, former MP Julian Huppert, Elisabeth Buggins from the Birmingham Women's NHS Foundation Trust and Richard Horton, editor in chief at medical journal The Lancet.

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Many other companies are working on ways to reduce the gap between data and insight. They include Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, which has numerous other ventures related to health on its books.

Apple's ResearchKit, an open-source system, is now being used in the UK to track the effects and symptoms of asthma. Meanwhile global heath NGOs such as the World Health Organisation are attempting to put in place similar systems so that large-scale disasters such as Ebola are easier to track (and solve) before they become mass-killers.

The NHS is also working on ways to formalise relationships with start-ups and entrepreneurs. Speaking at WIRED Health in 2015, Tony Young, NHS England's clinical director for innovation, said the goal was for the NHS to become "the go-to place on the planet for you to come and trial anything". "If there is a place on the planet you can innovate at scale, the NHS is it," he said. "We have datasets for our population going back 25 years."